Google Takeout is a Google service that allows you to download and backup your Gmail email data on your computer or take it anywhere with you. You can move your Gmail Mail to another service e.g. Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo Mail or move it to a cloud storage server such as Box, Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox or iCloud.

You not only have the ability to download your Gmail Mail, but you can also download and backup 17 other Google services such as Calendar, Blogger, Google Drive, Google Voice, Google+ Data, Contacts, YouTube and Picasa Photos.

Gmail provides a maximum storage limit of 15GB including shared data from Google Drive and Google Plus Pictures. You can see the amount of storage space that your Gmail is using by scrolling down to the bottom of the page and reading the Gigabytes (GB) just under the mail on the bottom left corner. In this case (picture below), the user is currently using 3.88 GB (25%) of 15GB.

Gmail contains the all the vital history of your email exchanges from the date you created your account, and provided you didn’t delete the data, you will be able to download it to your computer or any other service.

Why You Must Download Your Gmail Data

Why should you download and backup your Gmail data? If you are encountering regular and occasional Gmail Login problems, it should be a warning and reminder for you to download a copy of your Gmail on your computer. It is safe to download your Gmail messages in order to keep a copy in case your Gmail account gets hacked, hijacked or closed. When you aren’t able to log into your account for whatever reason, you will be able to keep a reference of your past and important email with friends, relatives, companies, clients and other contacts.

The second reason to download your email is to keep track of past email correspondencies.Email that was received a long time ago (e.g. 5 years ago) usually gets deleted or buried and forgotten as time goes on. Years later, we find that we need this old info. If you downloaded an archive of this email, you will be able to retrieve the old info, if not then you are screwed.

Finally, email servers like other web applications can be affected by bugs or attacked by internet viruses. Each year, security threats that thrive on the vulnerability of online services are born, and in some cases they can be fatal. The worst that can happen to your Gmail account is when you lose your data i.e. when your email is stolen or even wiped out by a virus or cyber criminal. Examples of cyber-attacks resulting in data loss include the Living Social hack of 26 April 2013, when hackers stole 50 million customer records, Adobe Inc. hack of 3 October 2013 when 152 million customer records including credit cards and debit cards were stolen, Target / Fazio Mechanical Services hack of 18 December 2013 when 110 million customer records including 40 million credit cards/debit cards were lost.